Virtual collections are logical groupings of either virtual
images or virtual machines. Virtual collections represent an application
topology, for example, one virtual image for a Web server, another
virtual image for a database server that are used together. A virtual
collection can have a test environment associated with it that describes
the application topology that it represents.
The function that this topic describes might
not be available, depending on how lab management permissions and
client access licenses have been defined for your user account. You must be integrated with an external
provider, such as VMLogix or Surgient or another tool that manages
virtual images and machines, to view or use virtual collections. For
information about setting up the integration of the external provider
application and
IBM® Rational® Quality
Manager,
see the product documentation for the external provider application.
Virtual collections are synchronized from an external provider.
You cannot manually create a virtual collection. The external provider
applications provide information about a collection of images, which
are visible in Rational Quality Manager. The
user can annotate this collection with a test environment. The test
environment describes what is created if the virtual image collection
is deployed and virtual machines are created from the images in the
collection. For example, when users see a virtual collection imported
into Rational Quality Manager,
they realize that this is their Web server test environment. Users
can create a test environment that describes their Web server and
add it to the virtual collection to identify it for other users.